C-sharp demand on par with Assembler - Apache releases a Java app server (Re: Skills in most demand)

[Dr Chaos]

Why would Ximian, Suse or Novell ( the owners of mono ) /help/ Microsoft ?

D'oh!

A zillion companies have all been seduced since the late 80's to sign
"cooperative agreements" with Microsoft, hoping to gain some business
out of being part of Microsoft's large and profitable empire.

All the "agreements" turned into a rape.

but they never learn: there's a sucker born every minute.

And how do you explain:

http://www.gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/

Dotgnu -- another c# compiler that is featured on the GNU/FSF homepage?

Because the GNU people are rightfully more paranoid about Microsoft and insist
on doing one with the GPL. I wonder if this is in effect a honeypot to
goad MSFT into suing them in order to prove their political point.

More of the IP issue is around the libraries than the fundamental
language design.

According to the Dotgnu site:
http://www.southern-storm.com.au/pnet_faq.html#q11_1

11.1. What is Mono?
The Mono project that is run by Ximian has many of the same goals as
DotGNU Portable.NET. See their Web site for further details:

http://www.go-mono.com/




A trojan horse implies that there is a glossy outer coating, with
something sinister and evil hidden inside. What no one in COLA has yet
to tell me in definitive terms is: what exactly is the catch ?

Microsoft can change its mind about suing.

And it will go after actual end-users. Read today's WSJ about MSFT
and their noises about the "lack of indemnification" against IP
violations.

Their message to people will be "If you use Linux it is just like
swapping music illegally: you will get Sued Up The Ass by Big Rich Companies."

It doesn't matter if it's true or not. It only matters if the the
non-geeks believe it.


".NET is a Microsoft platform."
---- Bill Gates, on the record (NEWS.COM)


I wouldn't be surprised if they find patent violations in Linux
and sue Google, right before the IPO prices.

 

[The Ghost In The Machine]

In comp.lang.java.advocacy, Jeff Relf
<[email protected]>
wrote

Hi The Ghost In The Machine,

You mentioned,
" C++ cannot do open-source/cross-platform applets
without an onboard compiler ".

Is that some big hurdle ?

People just download the appropriate binaries, so what ?

Correct. Or, with gcc, one builds one compiler, with another,
then builds a third compiler from the second. (The details
are available in the docs accompaying the gcc source code.)

Just make the source code available too.
( But I doubt that most would want to see that )

C# won't magically produce cross-platform code !

Nothing does. But all .NET code is cross-platform.
AFAIK, it was designed that way, though the first implementation
is Microsoft-specific. Mono, however, is not
Microsoft-specific, and will build on most platforms.

(For its part Java bytecode is also cross-platform.)

How do you know if your program will run ...
and run well ...
on a dual CPU Mac G5 with a 40 inch LCD or a cell phone
if you haven't tested it ?

If the .NET environment exists on said Mac, C# code will
run on said Mac. The main issue is libraries (WinForms).

All this is not some vision problem,
it just takes blood sweat and tears.

[.songsnip]

 

[The Ghost In The Machine]

In comp.lang.java.advocacy, asj
<[email protected]>
wrote

#1: C-sharp is a Microsoft invention and product, and using it
automatically means you are helping Microsoft.

C# may indeed be a Microsoft innovation (or maybe not), but
screwdrivers help a lot of people. Should we stop using them
because they were invented by someone?

#2: Mono is a trojan horse that will kill or wound Linux in future.
Why? Because Microsoft has patents on parts of it, something de Icaza
pooh poohs but is worrying lots of people.

That is a legitimate concern. Of course, patents are not
specific to C#. I had to withdraw a Perl counter because
GIF was patented, for example.

Believe me, Bill Gates and Ballmer are laughing at all the fools who
want mono to contaminate Linux, because they know they can pull the
plug on it anytime in future when and if it suits them (and this time,
there is no IBM angel to help out like the SCO problem - IBM is firmly
a Java vendor)

Then C# might simply fork. One part will become C#-MS, which will
serve the commercial subsector (or anyone Microsoft wants it to).
The other part may become C#-FreeOS or something, or perhaps
Gnu.NET. It will complicate things, of course, but Java has, in
a sense, already forked (Java vs. Kaffe vs. Jikes), though it's
not clear many pay much attention to said forking.

And C# might have already forked, as well, though I've not looked
at Gnu.NET.

Listen to what a gnome contributor wrote:
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono

Patents are the issue here, not C# per se. But it's clear that
this is a barbed offer -- and I for one would prefer Python or
PHP or a variant of C++ (I have a refcount template set I
developed that works reasonably well, for example) to C# or Java,
though with Java at least one can try to improve Kaffe, and
gcj has its plusses.

 

[Rob S. Pierre]

Why would Ximian, Suse or Novell ( the owners of mono ) /help/ Microsoft ?

Novell does not own Mono, you fool! Mono is an OSS-project.

And Novell is a _JAVA_ company and not a Mono-company.
Novell will use Eclipse as integration-tool and Novell is heavily involved
in J2EE-enterprise-development.

Is Novell's website written in ASP.NET? No way. It is 100% Java.
"Miguel" is a good liar. But who cares. It is not him deciding about
Novell's future direction. Eclipse and J2EE are much more important
for Novell then Mono ever will be.

Continue dreaming, John Bailo!

 

[Gnu Deal]

Novell does not own Mono, you fool! Mono is an OSS-project.

Novell bought Ximian, and mono is a Ximian sponsored project

Miguel de Icaza refers to himself as a 'Novell executive' and has 16
programmers employed by Novell working on mono.

And Novell is a _JAVA_ company and not a Mono-company.
Novell will use Eclipse as integration-tool and Novell is heavily involved
in J2EE-enterprise-development.

You are about 3 years behind the times.

mono is bundled in the Suse 9.1 distro.

Have you looked at the Novell website recently?

http://www.novell.com/linux/

Is Novell's website written in ASP.NET? No way. It is 100% Java.

Really? No HTML ?

"Miguel" is a good liar. But who cares. It is not him deciding about
Novell's future direction. Eclipse and J2EE are much more important
for Novell then Mono ever will be.

I live in the real world.

You live here:

http://www.angelfire.com/pop/1955/sanitarium.html

Continue dreaming, John Bailo!

I'm only sleeping.

 

[Raghar]

"Jörn W. Janneck" <jwjanneck at yahoo dot com> wrote in

then again, it is a country with limited financial resources, and in
spite of this it churns out a huge number of incredibly well-qualified
graduates---many of which go on to contribute to other societies,
especially the u.s., where indians are a significant and important
part of the academic community.

personally, i applaud the dedication of this large and poor country to
improving its condition through educating its people.

Education of few highly, or educating a lot poorly. How much would cost
them a free education for everyone?
Sadly current school system is more based on atempts to get money from
students. Not everyone should be forced into losing 4 years on university,
(and possibly forced into another 4 years on lower school) and get himself
into debts, just to get a higher sallary. It's just waste of time and
money. It's often just a "paper education". This means education, just to
get a paper, nothing more.

 

[Martin Trump]

Education of few highly, or educating a lot poorly.

Would you be kind enough to trim the newsgroups you're posting to?

This irrelevant to comp.lang.visual.misc

TIA

 

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

begin In <[email protected]>, on 06/05/2004
at 12:00 AM, The Ghost In The Machine

Nothing does. But all .NET code is cross-platform.

No.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT

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[The Ghost In The Machine]

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
<[email protected]>
wrote

begin In <[email protected]>, on 06/05/2004
at 12:00 AM, The Ghost In The Machine


No.

You'll have to clarify that response. Of course, perhaps I should
clarify mine, because as it turns out I'm wrong anyway (WinForms).
What I meant is that, once properly written code is compiled
using any .NET-supported compiler (C# among them), the resulting assembly
can be run anywhere if the libraries are available (which of
course precludes WinForms, but might include Gtk#, which
is portable to Win32, as well as to Linux and a few other places).

At least, that's my understanding, regarding Mono.

Mea culpa.

(Grrr. I hate it when I do that. )

 

[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

begin In <[email protected]>, on
06/01/2004
at 07:40 PM, (e-mail address removed) (asj) said:

How exactly does having to relearn new skills and tools make things
cheaper for the customer?

The Devil is in the details. Some tools make things less expensive,
some tools make things more expensive and of lesser quality, and some
tools are neutral.

and of course, programmers having to relearn an entire new language
means all the past experience and skills they have become obsolete

Only if they had never acquired competency in the first place.
Learning a programming language is only a small part of programming
well in that language, and a lot of important experience and skills is
language independent. Of course, Sturgeon's law applies, and there are
a lot of hack coders out there, but don't stake too much on the
quality of their work on the languages that they already know.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT

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[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

begin In <[email protected]>, on
06/01/2004

As much as *programmers* want stability in the tools,

Which programmers? Lots of programmers want better tools. They just
don't want change for the sake of change.

Like offshoring, these things make the cost of IT much lower for the
customer

Or, at least, that's the story that they swallowed hook, line and
sinker. Sometimes it turns out that quality goes down and that the
cost of an equivalent level of service is much higher.

Is it a big mistake ?

It's always a big mistake to make decisions based on wishful thinking
and fads.

Should programmers be paid like customer service
representatives rather than demigods ?

Should you stop beating your wife or cheating on your income taxes?
Programmers were never paid like demigods, or even like celebrities
and CEOs. When you start seeing programmers with 6 digit salaries, or
even a significant number with six digit salaries, then you may have
something vaguely approaching a justification for using that term.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT

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[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

begin In <[email protected]>, on
06/02/2004

Are most programmers really that 'qualified'

Are most managers?

I think there are a lot of *fakers* amoung us...

Sturgeon's law.

What I'm saying is that with sophisticated platforms like .NET with
automatic garbage collection, we can substitute a lot of low paid
programmers, ala India, for a few high paid programmers.

And you'll get what you paid for.

So, the job no longer requires quite the twists and turns of what
was needed in the past,

It requires even more. And you don't seem to grasp what was needed in
the past and why; there's a difference between coding and programming.

So, a .NET fly by wire, writen in Advanced XML, would require a lot
of $55,000 a year people, to basically make sure there were enough
try/catch blocks to insure stability.

Stability is not something that you bolt on, no matter what Redmond
told you. If you want stability, you need to design for it ab initio.

But nobody would have to worry about null pointers, for instance,

What gives you that idea?

so why pay big bucks ?

No reason; you can always let the customer debug it.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT

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[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

I would agree that there is a bit of a language problem due to the
fact that English is not their first language,

All generalizations are false, including this one. Some have a
language problem, some don't. There are more substantive issues than
that straw dummy.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT

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[Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz]

begin In <[email protected]>, on 06/09/2004
at 04:00 AM, The Ghost In The Machine

You'll have to clarify that response.

Just what it says: .net code is not cross-platform. It is basically
redmondware, is oriented to redmond operating system and won't run on
all of the platforms that, e.g., Java will.

What I meant is that, once properly written code is compiled using
any .NET-supported compiler (C# among them), the resulting assembly
can be run anywhere if the libraries are available

That's still not true. FTP whatever libraries you want to, e.g., z/OS,
and you still won't be able to run your .net code.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT

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the right to publicly post or ridicule any abusive E-mail.

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[Tom Shelton]

begin In <[email protected]>, on 06/09/2004
at 04:00 AM, The Ghost In The Machine


Just what it says: .net code is not cross-platform. It is basically
redmondware, is oriented to redmond operating system and won't run on
all of the platforms that, e.g., Java will.

You're going to have to clarify that... Are you talking about .NET or the
ECMA/ISO C#/CLI? Currently, Rotor - the ECMA/ISO reference version of the
C# compiler and CLI runs on Windows, FreeBSD, and MacOS X. Mono runs on
all of these and a lot more...

Code written and compiled in VS.NET can generally be run on Linux and the
Mono runtime with out change (with the caveat that the library classes are
currently implemented - which is becomming less of an issue as time
passes.). I would say that it is definately cross platform. As cross
platform as Java? Not yet. But Java, like .NET, is only as cross platform
as the number of systems the java runtime has been ported to. The Java
runtime has been around a lot more years - it has had time to be ported to
many OS's/architectures. But for me, right now, C# is as cross platform as
I need it to be - it runs on windows and linux x86.

That's still not true. FTP whatever libraries you want to, e.g., z/OS,
and you still won't be able to run your .net code.

If there was no runtime for z/OS, then that would apply to your java code
as well. Java wasn't always as cross platform as it is today....

 

[Jeff Relf]

Hi Tom Shelton and Shmuel Metz,

Don't forget that Java is about quick and dirty ( Filthy ? )
applets ... not full-blown applications.

Tom knows that I'm writing an app, RRR_Puppy,
which is targeting my Win98 box,
as well as Numerous PC's on campus, including WinXP.

Out of the many hundreds of PC's that I have access to,
MacOS X doesn't even show up on my radar.
Linux is worse than that, it's no where to be found.
( Because I don't have root access anywhere )

But ... If I were to target MacOS X or Linux,
I'd _ Still _ use C++ ... C# is a sick joke.

 

[The Ghost In The Machine]

In comp.lang.java.advocacy, Jeff Relf
<[email protected]>
wrote

Hi Tom Shelton and Shmuel Metz,

Don't forget that Java is about quick and dirty ( Filthy ? )
applets ... not full-blown applications.

Tom knows that I'm writing an app, RRR_Puppy,
which is targeting my Win98 box,
as well as Numerous PC's on campus, including WinXP.

Out of the many hundreds of PC's that I have access to,
MacOS X doesn't even show up on my radar.
Linux is worse than that, it's no where to be found.
( Because I don't have root access anywhere )

But ... If I were to target MacOS X or Linux,
I'd _ Still _ use C++ ... C# is a sick joke.

Well, now you've got me curious. Precisely why is C# a sick joke?

As for Java: it's running on a lot of servers. JBoss is
very popular, and there are commercial J2EE variants
running amuck (BEA WebLogic, IBM's WebSphere come to mind).
Most of Java's applications relate to serving Web browsers,
as far as I can tell.

I can't say Sun's laughing all the way to the bank (they
aren't that healthy looking yet) but at least they're smiling.

 

[General Protection Fault]

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.lang.java.advocacy.]

Hi Tom Shelton and Shmuel Metz,

Don't forget that Java is about quick and dirty ( Filthy ? )
applets ... not full-blown applications.

?

Applets are dead. Java is reborn in the application server.

The simple fact that Java is being used where it was never intended is a sign
that Java is a complete technology.

 

[Dag Sunde]

Hi Tom Shelton and Shmuel Metz,

Don't forget that Java is about quick and dirty ( Filthy ? )
applets ... not full-blown applications.

....and the last time you used Java was... '95?

Luckily, the rest of the market, and half of my customers
don't have that insight you just shared with us...

:-D

I use (and my customers prefer) Java for Enerprice Apps,
Stand alone Apps, and for custom Web apps (Applets).


<snipped/>

 

[Jeff Relf]

Hi Dag Sunde,

You mentioned that you and your customers prefer,
" Java for Enterprise Apps, Stand alone Apps,
and for custom Web apps ( Applets ). "

You probably work in a very large company ...

Big Corps suck, I say.